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I Liked this article except for one tiny detail... I LIKED IT FIRST ON SharkyExtreme.com....

Maybe you should put a disclaimer at the beginning letting everyone know you are a thief and you lack creativity. Now I remember why I stopped coming to this website.

Check here for this same article written at Sharky's site... compare the two it is word-for-word from Sharky.....Didn't know everyone was gonna have to start stealing content to try and get more hits on their banners....this is VERY SAD.http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardwar...l_1ghz_mobile/

It has come to my attention that you may have used this article with permission....even if you did...you did not give Sharkyextreme.com credit for their hard *** work.. Let's get a response please.....

Even if SharkyExtreme is on the same network...he should still get credit for the report first as he reported it...FIRST.

You share articles...wonderful....now your readers get the same article on two sites...YAY!!! Oh Joy...why read it once...when you can read it twice....I bet that really drives those banner impressions through the roof doesn't it?

Hey.....some of this is personal opinion...I realize that but this really is a form of theft even if it's indirectly.....

Some magazines are owened by the same publishing company and they still give credit to the other magazine they are borrowing stories from PLUS they will put their own twist to the work....so you can get two sides of the story.......changing up some of the text would have been nice...but oh well...why put time and effort into something when "cut and pastew" is available.

There is really no "first" or "last" in this case, as the article was written by an Internet.com contributor and posted concurrently on both sites.

While I appreciate your comments that some visitors may inadvertantly read the same content on both sites, I think it comes down to SE and HWC catering to different kinds of readers and simply supplying the article to both groups.

i think cack needs to find a new hobby...
there is no need for this kind of garbage talk... as the admin so nicely pointed out .... the article was not written by SE but by an internet.com employee. seeing as how internet.com owns both websites there is no harm in what they are doing... 10 bucks says that you are also one of those fanatic hardocp patrons who feels he needs to "represent"... lame ... i doubt Kyle or even Stevewould be proud . Even Steve who posted on Hardocp.com that it may be stolen offered to say "I may be way off base here, that is why I am letting you judge this one for yourself". i also believe that as webmaster/newsman/whatever
he should have contacted HWC before posting what he did and the manner in which he did

David S.....excuse me but I also said that some of this may be personal opinion but let's hear some of this "garbage talk" come out of your mouth....

Quote "i think cack needs to find a new hobby...[Edit]...10 bucks says that you are also one of those fanatic hardocp patrons who feels he needs to "represent"... lame ... " EndQuote

Moral: Practice what you preach.

In short...so this does not turn into a flame war..... I recant calling this theft/plagarism....but that's all I'll recant as I know of only two print magazines that traded articles verbatim from one another and both are now defunct.

No...this is not theft...it's laziness on the part of internet.com. It's still an insult to your readership but it's a choice they have made and I'm sure they will continue to use it.

While nothing legally wrong or even morally wrong has been done here, mistakes have been made.

1. The author of the Hardware Central copy of the article was not listed. It merely lists "internet.com author" or a title along those lines, and does not even give a proper mailto, it's just a blank tab. A proper credit to Joshua Krane on both pages, with the notation that he is an employee of Internet.com, would have prevented much, if not all, of this entire brouhaha.

2. The speed of the general internet community in spotting these kinds of similarities is unparalleled. There will always be someone who frequents both of two high profile sites, and who will notice this article being on both pages, and who will tell other people about it. While the argument that it was "illegal" or "morally wrong" may or may not be true, the secondary argument, that being that articles should be written on a per-website basis and shouldn't shared, is a sound one. If many websites share articles, that robs websites of originality, and chases people away from your websites to other websites, ones like H|OCP or smaller independant sites, where they can trust that the articles they read are made for the webpage, and not written by a corporation for posting on many of their "facade" webpages.

Bottom line: I personally feel that this could have been averted with a proper credit on the HardwareCentral article, and I also feel that content sharing (and content writing by a background corporation) is a major no-no when it comes to webpage design. It may not matter much to you, but I cannot trust that either website will post information that isn't processed through some PR engine anymore, and therefore I will not frequent it anymore, and I will recommend that my friends do the same. You will now lose out on ad revenue, rather than increasing it, as a simple link to your other website would have done.

If you look a bit more carefully, you will notice that I am listed on BOTH articles as the author. On the HWC version, my name is at the end. On SE, my name is at the begining. The point is not where the name is, but that it is in fact there, on both articles.

In reality, I was commisioned by Internet.com to write the article for Internet.com, not HWC and not SE. The article 1st appeared on HWC. I was thrilled that it was also run on SE. In a perfect world, both sites reach a different audience, and the article got the most exposure by being on BOTH sites. Where it appeared 1st it a moot point. Which site it was written for is also moot. When I wrote the article I gave it to Internet.com to do with as they pleased.

Since I wrote the article for Internet.com, it is not necessary to give credit to either HWC or SE for running it. The only credits necessary are both in place: Internet.com is the publisher, and I am the author.

As for your comments:

411SPonge - yes it is possible. Dell is offering a 1GHz laptop for under $2500, I see no reason why other manufacturers should not be able to market a similarly priced product.

Cack - I appreciate your "championing" this cause for me. I can only suggest that you do some investigation before you start accusing people of theft. The Internet.com crew is a good one, they work very hard, and they have been very kind to me. You could have simply asked what was up instead of going right to accusations. Again, I appreciate your concern, and even feel you had good reasoning...it was your delivery that could have improved.

Vendetta01 - I understand your point. In my eyes Internet.com did a good thing. As a result, my article got 2x the exposure it would have gotten on just one site. Had I been commisioned by someone at a particular site (HWC or SE) your argument about a per-website basis would be vaild and well founded.

3 years ago all of these sites were fan sites. I miss the "old" internet when people posted articles written about what they liked. Unfortunately these sites are a catch 22: the larger you get, the more the reader demands, and the more it costs you to run the site. I have worked for fan sites in the past, and even started a few myself. I have also worked for corporations who ran websites. While it is sad that most of these sites are drying up and shutting down, corporate involvement has made it possible for many sites to survive. They allow sites to maintain better staff, and offer marketing and advertising benefits that no solo website could manage.

As for this article, my focus was pretty much dead center between the corporate focus of HWC and the enthusiast focus of SE. If both demographics saw this article, than I am VERY pleased.

Again, thanks for the feedback, positive and negative. One thing I can promise you is that the folks at Internet.com do read these comments, and listen to your suggestion accordingly.

Joshua

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The best things to come out of Berkeley was LSD and UNIX. Coincidence? I think not!

[This message has been edited by TheDude (edited 03-22-2001).]

The best things to come out of Berkeley was LSD and UNIX. Coincidence? I think not!